Veronika the cow has a scratching broom, and she knows how to use it

The second Antonio Osuna-Mascaró and Alice Auersperg saw a video of Veronika the cow scratching her backside with a branch, they knew they had to drop everything to go meet her.

The cognitive biologists from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna have long been studying tool use among non-human animals, but they’d never seen it in a cow before. 

“We jumped in the car immediately, and we drove for five hours to the south of Austria from Vienna to meet Veronika,” Osuna-Mascaró told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.  

Veronika, he said, did not disappoint. 

The researchers gave her a broom, and were blown away by how quickly and dexterously she made use of it, employing different techniques to relieve her various itches.

They say their findings, published in the journal Current Biology on Monday, upend long-held assumptions about the intelligence of cows.

WATCH | Veronika gets her scratch on:

Holy cow! Watch this bovine scratch herself with a broom

Veronika, a 13-year-old brown Swiss cow living in an Austrian mountain village, has blown scientists away with her ability to use a broom to scratch herself, marking a rare instance of demonstrated tool use in livestock. Researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna say her dexterity and ingenuity prove that people have long underestimated the intelligence of cows. [Video credit: University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna]

Veronika is a 13-year-old brown Swiss cow who lives as a pet in the mountain village of Nötsch in southern Austria.

Her owner, Witgar Wiegele, first noticed her picking up branches and using them to scratch herself about nine years ago. Over the years, she learned to use short ones to relieve itches near her head, and long ones to get to those hard-to-reach places, Wiegele told the researchers.

Veronika wasted no time showing off her skills for the scientists. Within five minutes of their arrival last summer, Wiegele handed the cow a stick, and she got down to business. 

“We almost fell on the ground,” Osuna-Mascaró said. “It was really, really impressive.”

The scientist wanted to test whether Veronika’s scratching met the criteria for “flexible tooling,” which is defined as using an object to extend one’s own body while applying mechanical force to a target.

So they gave her a broom.

“Because a broom,” Mascaró says, “has a functional end and a non-functional end.”

Not only did Veronika immediately show a preference for scratching with the bristled side of the broom, but she started figuring out different ways of using the tool to meet her varying needs. 

She used the broom-end to scratch the thick-skinned parts of her body, like her back, but switched to the handle to get at the softer, more sensitive areas, like her udder and belly.

Tool-use widespread in animals

Benjamin Beck, a retired scientist from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and co-author of the book Animal Tool Behavior, says Veronika’s scratching undoubtedly meets the criteria for flexible tool use.

“This is a wonderful example of tool use by a cow, and it is indeed remarkable that Veronika often uses different ends of the tool, each with different properties, on different areas of her body,” Beck told CBC in an email.

However, he challenged the authors’ assertion that this is the first documented example of flexible tool use in cattle. 

In his book, he and his colleagues also describe water buffalos in zoos dislodging rails from fences and using those to scratch themselves.

Veronika’s behaviour does, however, seem to be unique among bovines, he said.

Scientists remain divided on whether tool-use in animals is a sign of advanced cognition, or just natural programming. 

But what’s for sure is that documented tool use in animals is increasingly widespread. 

Dolphins have been seen using shells to scoop up fish. An elephant at a zoo in Berlin has been documented using a hose to give herself showers. Some fish use hard surfaces to crack open hard-shelled prey. Boxer crabs use sea anemones as defensive weapons.

Crows not only use a variety of tools, but even craft them to suit their specific needs. 

It’s a far cry from human’s understanding of the animal kingdom before 1960, when the late primatologist Jane Goodall first documented tool use in chimpanzees, upending the long-held assumption that tool-use was the defining characteristic that separated humans from other animals.

Still, Mascaró says research into tool-use has tended to focus on more exotic animals, rather than the livestock we’re so often surrounded by. 

“This is because we tend to underestimate the cognitive abilities of those animals that we exploit,” he said.